Olivia, Womankind
by bforbrigitta
Summary: One woman's journey into becoming Olivia the agent, Olivia the friend and Olivia the mother.
1. Chapter 1

_One woman's journey into becoming Olivia the agent, Olivia the friend and Olivia the mother._

**Olivia, Womankind**  
_Chapter 1_

When she was nineteen, Olivia dreamed of being a cop for the first time. She hadn't had a gun pointed at her before and she couldn't shake the fear of death or the deep, searing pulses of her heart (she was asleep but they were unmistakably real, Olivia was sure). She wasn't ready to die, not even close, and when she jolted awake in a cold sweat she had seriously considered giving up then and there. Maybe go back to that accounting major she left—she'd always been good with numbers. What would she know, after all? She was just nineteen—she was a kid.

But she marched on, despite being afraid, because that is exactly what her stepdad used to tell her, and she would _not_ let him be proven right after all these years.

Her mother, though, worried about her, and would later die to never know how capable and, most of all, excellent an agent she would become. She'd always been a mild-mannered kid and she used to feel so goddamned ill-equipped for the nature of the work. It became bigger than just the jeering or catcalling. Though she, at first, had desperately tried to avoid the glare of being one of the few women in her division, her new reality of patronising male peers only ended up empowering her to transform her weaknesses into what became her vitality.

(And eventually she'd even learn to no longer retreat into her room and cry at the end of a particularly hard day)

Olivia had always been good with numbers—this much was true—but she was even better at doing the right thing, protecting the helpless and surviving innumerable calamities. She was no longer afraid of death, she found, but the stakes were different this time. She wouldn't want—couldn't bare, even if in an afterlife—to miss out on her life with Peter or Etta. She wouldn't want her daughter to be robbed of what she was robbed of too. So every day she comes to work, ready to evade death once again.

{tbc}

Chapter 2 in progress.


	2. Chapter 2

_One woman's journey into becoming Olivia the agent, Olivia the friend and Olivia the mother._

**Olivia, Womankind  
**_Chapter 2_

Olivia had learnt to accept the things that didn't go her way (which were essentially just a collision of various cosmic misalignments; someone in the universe had a twisted sense of humour), but there were incidents like emCharlie/em that she still couldn't help but grieve. Because now he would never know how much it meant to her that he understood her the way he did. Things with Charlie weren't supposed to be done. They were left, in suspense, in that hospital room after Olivia was first thrust into the other universe then thrust back out. It was ironic; he was dead and she was alive but she was the one with the unfinished business and the living could never penetrate the grave. Sometimes she wished Walter was around to fix that. Though she wished Walter was around for a lot of things.

Olivia would watch Astrid some days, memorising every smile line on her face and every curl on her head, in case another Olivia from a distant timeline threatened to overwrite her again (even though it "gave" her a lot of things, like Peter and their love and her life "back" if you could really say that she had lost it in the first place) but she'd missed enough chances and she was not going to let another one slip through the cracks—not when Astrid had lost so much too.

(Sometimes Astrid even looked at Etta as if she was the Walter that she lost, looking for him inside of her. More often than not, she found him—traces—but undoubtedly there.)

Some nights when her thoughts weren't of her family or work, or of the Charlie that never came to be, they were on the old fragments of the lonely soul she had been for most of her life. And she thought of the Olivia from the other universe, with her lush auburn hair, girl friends and wild nights that weren't just her in a lab with the same three people. But then she'd look to her left where Peter slept and then down at the little blonde head between them and drank it all in. One night when Etta was besotted with a new friend at daycare, she found herself a little bit more.

"Just like mom and Aunt Astrid," she'd chirped in a little sleepy voice.

Olivia had hesitated at first. Over the years she didn't think that they'd had so much of a friendship as they did a 'quiet companionship'. Because Olivia didn't like throwing words like "love" or "friend" around unless she meant it, and she, classically Olivia, thought about it long and hard.

If a friend was someone who'd consistently seen her through the dark over the last decade, who had her complete and profound trust and whose capacity to love she deeply revered, then Astrid was still so much more than that.

She tucked a strand of hair behind Etta's ear before she softly whispered back.

Maybe in another time, in another universe where she wasn't broken, she'd have another chance. But _this_ was her life, and it may have been in fragments but the pieces were all still there, and she would cherish all that she could salvage.

"Now that's something special, baby girl."

{tbc}

Chapter 3 in progress.


End file.
